National View

The House is set to go along with a bipartisan Senate compromise that would link college students’ interest rates to the financial markets and offer borrowers lower rates this fall. The Senate bill hews closely to one the House already has passed, and leaders from both parties and in both chambers expect those differences won’t stand in the way of quick resolution, perhaps as early as Wednesday.

July 29, 2013-- Next month a new Obama-administration policy will give the public greater access to research funded by the federal government. This is good news for the scientific community as well as the general public—but not all university-based research is covered by the new policy, and some of it presents far more complex transparency issues. Announced last February, the memo from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy requires federal agencies that spend over $100 million annually supporting research and development to make the results of that (non-classified) research, as well as the underlying data, available to the public within a year of publication. The one-year period allows publishers of scientific journals time to retain their rights and make money.

July 18, 2013--Policymakers are drowning in pools of incomparable data. And as policymakers set out to create good education policy, we see a pressing need for a unified effort to build a holistic system of metrics around the issues that matter the most for student success. With a better system in place, policymakers will be able to assess data clearly and compare it across all colleges and universities.

Last week's settlement between the U.S. Education Department's Office for Civil Rights and a California school district may have been issued at the K-12 level, but the newly clear message that federal laws prohibit discrimination based on gender identity applies to colleges too, experts say. The U.S. Departments of Justice and Education jointly determined that California's Arcadia School District violated Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibits sex discrimination, by barring a transgender student from sex-specific facilities and activities. All schools and colleges receiving federal funds are obligated to comply with Title IX or risk losing that funding.